Michael

Ranjit Jeyakodi's Michael has brilliant frames and music, which fail to save the wafer-thin story.

Jaafar Jackson is electric, but the movie is not.

Michael remains a passable biopic that looks good, sounds great, and delivers the moments fans came for. But it also feels formulaic in a way that's hard to ignore. For those hoping for a more thoughtful biopic, Michael settles into a safe retelling of familiar beats, playing out more like a glossy, carefully curated Wikipedia page.

Rammed with every music-movie cliche, an almost mute supporting cast and a Michael who only produces endless smiley blandness, this is a frustratingly shallow film. But this is a frustratingly shallow, inert picture, a kind of cruise-ship entertainment, which can't quite bring itself to show that Michael was an abuse victim, brutalised by his father and robbed of his childhood.

Jaafar's casting might have seemed a bit too all in the family, but the fact that he doesn't do his own singing didn't bother me, because this guy channels Uncle Michael in uncanny ways and simply sells this performance with all the right dance moves and sharp dramatic talent to make us believe Michael Jackson is once again with us. This Michael is the film fans will line up for more than once, a chance to see this genius up close and in Imax like never before.

'Michael' is a genre movie trying too hard to look the part and unfortunately, it shows. While it may believe that it is an homage to the action heroes of the norm, it ends up merely being a formula film that severely falls short of successfully emulating all the tropes it relies so heavily on to be taken seriously at all.

Jaafar Jackson did a great job, but the film is a 'whitewashed' depiction of the pop icon's life that presents a clichéd and incomplete portrayal.

Antoine Fuqua's biopic of Michael Jackson is too reverential and has nothing original to say. The film is too sanitised, bland and flat, with a script that is frustratingly shallow and does not take an interest in digging beneath the surface.

While Jaafar Jackson eerily brings his uncle to life, one can always go online for a touch of MJ magic, as the film is so vanilla that it becomes completely disengaging. The King of Pop, who gave us so many hours of joy, deserved far more than what the usually gifted Fuqua gives him here.

Michael is a labour of love that, at times, feels too laboured and tries hard to impress. Despite an earnest effort by its actors and the technical team, the film falls short of finding its own strong voice in the melee of gangster dramas we have seen in the last decade.

Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan don't exactly break the mold with Michael, nor do they stuff it with major revelations. But they tap into a vein of melancholy underlaying the stratospheric success that's surprisingly affecting. Simply as a celebration of Jackson's songs and stagecraft, it's phenomenal, shot by Dion Beebe with visual electricity in the performance sequences.